A ‘Warning’ To Us All

â€œPatriotism is not pinning a flag pin to one lapel to free up both hands, so you can tear up the U.S. Constitution.â€
-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in The Warning.

The new production company/website Truthtopower.tv has just released its powerful first film, The Warning, featuring exclusive interviews with five recently-published authors Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Crimes Against Nature), Naomi Wolf (The End of America), Chris Hedges (American Fascists), Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) and Joe Conason (It Can Happen Here). Director/Writer/Producer J.P. Sottile wisely steers clear of cinematic fireworks, keeping a tight focus on the writers’ frightening observations about the subversion and erosion of American Democracy in recent years. Privatized warfare, illegal torture and wiretapping, corporate and religious influence, the ballooning power of the Executive and more are exposed as the film warns just how slippery a slope the U.S. is sliding down. The Warning is an excellent example of the kind of patriotic dissent the country needs right now.
Find out more and get your own copy here.

I strongly suggest that you open your mind. Your comment is the kind of thinking that allows what is happening in the USA today. You’d be surprised how much you have in common with these commentators, if you are truly against the tyranny growing around us. To dismiss them, out-of-hand, is to play the MSM game of left/right/dem/repub/lib/cons/red/blue BS. Wake up and forget everything you thought you knew about politics. Make up your own mind on the facts.

Naomi Klein's preposterous conclusions were exposed shortly after The Shock Doctrine was first published. If Milton Friedman were still alive, she'd clearly be on the hook for libel. It's also crystal clear that Klein never actually read the context of her main quotation from Friedman, which she has characterized as the free-marketers' "manifesto." Anyone with even a cursory understanding of Friedman's work would know that Klein's descriptions of it are exactly the opposite of what Friedman actually advocated.

The problem is that authoritarian rule is what many Americans want. How often have you heard people say “the country ought to be run like a business!” or “why can’t the police just shoot people, when they know they’re guilty?” Till recently, the authoritarian strain in US society has manifested itself mainly in religion and in corporate management. But now it’s in public life as well. As long as it looks like it’s only dark-skinned people with an unpopular religion who suffer, most Americans will go along, ignore the embarrassing stuff. Look at how Chicago has been run most of the 20th century!

Except for Austrian School economists, how many of those who find fault with Friedman’s “free market” thinking revile him for his support of the non-free market Federal Reserve banking system and for his idea for payroll tax withholding during WW2?

I suspect that those who believe that Friedman’s theories are somehow responsible for the emerging police state fascism do not regard the Fed and fractional reserve banking as the “brains” behind this horror. Nor do they see see both the Fed and payroll withholding as relatively painless means for redistributing wealth from the middle and lower classes to the political class and its supporters. I am even willing to bet that such Friedman detractors are hostile to a gold backed currency and eagerly embrace both the Fed and the national income tax. They see such institutions as useful central planning tools but only in the right hands, of course.

It has been observed that sewage is 95% pure water. Such is the make up of Friedman’s theories. His critics are tossing out the pure water and guzzling down the toxins. They then blame their ensuing sickness on the pure water.

What these people are are liberal spin doctors and are no different than the “conservative” ones…they are foot soldiers for the the same group of elites. Both are equally harmful to the country and should be mercilessly hunted down and destroyed!

I stopped listening to these kinds of people many years ago…instead, I read what the Founders had to say about such things as we presently face and I’ve always found their council vastly more accurate, more trustworthy, more sagacious and more insightful than anyone alive today.

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

“Now, I admit to being a journalist. I admit to being an investigative journalist, a researcher, and Iâ€™m not here to argue theory. Iâ€™m here to discuss what happens in the messy real world when Milton Friedmanâ€™s ideas are put into practice, what happens to freedom, what happens to democracy, what happens to the size of government, what happens to the social structure, what happens to the relationship between politicians and big corporate players, because I think we do see patterns.

Now, the Friedmanites in this room will object to my methodology, I assure you, and I look forward to that. They will tell you, when I speak of Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin and the Chicago Boys, China under Deng Xiaoping, or America under George W. Bush, or Iraq under Paul Bremer, that these were all distortions of Milton Friedmanâ€™s theories, that none of these actually count, when you talk about the repression and the surveillance and the expanding size of government and the intervention in the system, which is really much more like crony capitalism or corporatism than the elegant, perfectly balanced free market that came to life in those basement workshops. Weâ€™ll hear that Milton Friedman hated government interventions, that he stood up for human rights, that he was against all wars. And some of these claims, though not all of them, will be true.

But hereâ€™s the thing. Ideas have consequences. And when you leave the safety of academia and start actually issuing policy prescriptions, which was Milton Friedmanâ€™s other lifeâ€”he wasnâ€™t just an academic. He was a popular writer. He met with world leaders around the worldâ€”China, Chile, everywhere, the United States. His memoirs are a â€œwhoâ€™s who.â€ So, when you leave that safety and you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories. So, to quote Friedmanâ€™s great intellectual nemesis, John Kenneth Galbraith, â€œMilton Friedmanâ€™s misfortune is that his policies have been tried.â€

>I wonder: how many millions of gallons of blood will be spilled in the struggle for liberty this time?

More than we can afford – and probably worldwide.

Not that its going to make a damned bit of difference. The corporatist-fascist state is already here in all but name.

Actually, its been here for awhile. Generations, in fact – arguably since it’s establishment. America is a plutocracy that maintains the institutions of a republic in order to buy the support of the bourgiesie. Anyone who maintains distance from the political consensus, Left or Right, can see this.

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
– Frank Zappa

I’ve been documenting the appearance of “security” CCTV cameras in my city for many years now. Actually, some of them are called traffic safety cameras. Either way, their numbers have grow ten fold in the last decade.

The police-state has been nurtured along by Democrats and Republicans alike…and I think they’re just about ready to spring the trap…Barack Hussein Obama! It will be the magic negro who will knowingly preside over the inauguration of the full blown totalitarian police-state! Hopefully this will spark a Civil War, because a Civil War is our last chance to wrest control of our nation from the grip of the Jew bankers that Thomas Jefferson warned us about.

I agree that the revolution must be defused before it begins and that all measures to do so are alreay in place, including secret prisons on American soil manned by foriegners because Americans may hesitate for that nano second before firinf on their own. I believe Bush is ans has been a brainless puppet used to put even more wealth and power into the 1% who controls it. The only way to preserve or get back our freedoms , unfortunately, may be revolution because we are being lulled by digital television into the worst complacency I have witnessed in 6 decades. We are on the verge of losing it all and don’t notice or seem to care. Is America worth fighting for or should we all surrender before we have begun to fight? I have just begun to fight and regret I have only one life to give to my country, to quote a few good Americans.

I believe that very few good (pro-freedom) people in the US understand the nature of that is happening over last 50 years.

The truth is that there is one fundamental difference between an island (or mountain) state and a continental state, especially when we think about the biggest continent of EuroAsia.

For the state that is located on an island, or a state that is located in the mountains there are strong natural barriers for external invasion. Therefore, it’s enough to have less powerful Army , and such Army can be professional as opposed to draft based.

For a continental state it MUST have strong Army, and it MUST have draft, and it MUST have much stronger central power. Since if these rules are not obeyed, such state will cease to exist.

In the past technology was used sometimes to emulate “island state” situation for a continental one – for example the Great Wall of China is one example.

The US initially had started as a) an extension of UK political and European culture b) as an island state – since it stretched from ocean to ocean, and threats from North and South were not significant. That allowed for a political culture with very limited central Government to emerge.

Even 2nd WW was a war of choice for the US. The war did not spread to US soil and direct military losses very very small (500K) compared to European (7M for Germany, 10M for the USSR etc.)

But the technology progressed and nuclear weapons, ICBM, aviation, cruise missiles – all that resulted in the erosion position of the “island state”. Although nuclear weapon prevented future wars for Russia (thus resulting is much milder political regime over the 60 years that passed since The War) and the US, the very need to develop modern strategic army, and the ability to get involved all over the globe resulted in the US becoming more of a “continental state” as opposed to times 200 years ago.

Therefore the evolution from the original forms for “freedom” in the US, towards totalitarian state was inevitable. People in the US don’t have the historical experience of strong central Govt., don’t have the traditions that allow to combine strong Govt with ability to reflect popular opinions and respect citizens, even having the tools to suppress and harass them.

Unfortunately it is no possible to get back to US “island”. Unfortunately the US Empire has to collapse, and combined with lack of political culture for handling strong Govt., combined with infestation of the US with 3rd World 3rd class population (since the BEST people of the 3rd World stay at home and will not move the the US to get to the bottom of social hierarchy) – all these factors make the future of the US very uncertain.

On the other hand Russia, has managed the unmanageable – combining much higher degree of freedom, with strong central Govt, with adequate Army, as well as active acquisition of better technologies for economics, politics, technology proper and low rate of migration from the 3rd world – the only real migration in Russia is from former USSR territories, which were part of one country anyways.

So, if Russia manages to maintain very strong nuclear forces that would prevent the US from even thinking about resolving the above mentioned problem and taking away our hard earned freedom by force, the outlook for Russia is very good.